Whether you’re just launching your website, or have been doing it for a while, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy and make it more relevant to the current times. It is always wise to keep your content up-to-date, innovative, and engaging for your customers and compels them to take necessary actions.
What is Content Strategy?
Content strategy is the process of planning, creating, distributing and measuring content in online forms to achieve business goals. A successful content strategy is designed to keep your audience engaged at every stage of the sales funnel. A content strategy helps businesses to realize their KPIs in a sustainable fashion and better channel their marketing efforts.
Producing high-quality content builds trust with the audience and helps in succeeding in the long run. With marketers actively investing in content strategy, it is time to up your ante to fight the competition in the market.
What consists of a good Content Strategy?
The thought of creating a content strategy may appear overwhelming in the beginning but is an important step to achieving content marketing goals and expectations. With the right planning and execution, a good content strategy can meet KPIs and fulfil organizational goals. To develop a strong content strategy it is important to analyze:
- Who will be reading your content?
- What problems are you solving for your audience?
- What makes your content or offering unique?
- Which content formats should be focused on?
- On which channels will the content be published?
- How to manage the process of content creation and publication?
Here’s how you can develop a content strategy framework for your business:
Define your goal
To create a successful content strategy begin by defining the goals or objectives of your marketing plan. Who is your audience? What are you trying to achieve with your content plan? What customer pain points are you looking to solve? How is what you’re offering different from that of your competitors? How strong your strategy is will be an answer to these questions. Knowing and understanding your goals before you sit to plan your strategy is a more full-proof way of ensuring success.
Know your audience
If you don’t know who your content is addressed to, then the whole point of the content strategy is meaningless. Identify your target audience, their interests, and how they spend time online. Creating a generalized profile for your audience and identifying the “buyer persona” are key points in curating content that is useful to your audience. Mapping your audience persona can help you produce more relevant and valuable content for the users.
Determine your content format
Most organizations begin with blog posts when starting with their content marketing efforts. Depending on your business, niche, and audience, it is important to determine the content formats that you’ll leverage for gaining maximum traction. Experiment with different content formats like articles, blogs, videos, social media posts, white papers, etc. to determine the effectiveness of each format. Test your results, audience reaction, and come up with a solid strategy based on these results.
Identify best channels for promoting content
Multichannel marketing has become the norm in digital marketing. For your content to make an impact it is important to promote it on the right channels. Marketing where your audience is ensures higher eyeballs and maximum engagement. Social media, email marketing, display ads, publishing on own website are some of the channels for publishing content online. While for some LinkedIn is a better platform, other B2C companies may opt for Instagram or Facebook. The platform you choose to market your content on depends entirely on your audience and the type of business you operate.
Quantify your content
The best way to know if your content strategy is working is to measure it. Firstly define your KPIs so that you know how you’re faring concerning the goals. Run A/B tests to analyze which content is working and producing better results amongst your audience. You can change different elements like headlines, CTA, keywords and analyze your content accordingly. Without quantifying and measuring the effectiveness of the content strategy it becomes impossible to improve and produce quality content.
Optimize and repurpose your content regularly
The reason for continuous testing and measuring of your content is to optimize it regularly and improve it for your audience. Optimizing the content would mean changing keywords, writing new subject lines for your blog or article, changing the layout and design of the content, or revising the publishing strategy. Great content doesn’t happen overnight and is often a result of different writing strategies. If you have content that is generating a great user response then it makes sense to repurpose and use it for different platforms and generate greater traction. Content repurposing happens when content is reworked, updated, refreshed, for some other use, so you can get more from it in the longer run.
A successful content marketing strategy takes time, organization, and strategy to show results. It demands exquisite planning, attention to detail, keeping new trends in mind, and involvement from all relevant stakeholders. While a good content strategy doesn’t happen overnight and is a labour of month’s of work, it is surely worth the dividends as it helps in reaching all the KPIs and keeping customers engaged.